@ KitsunePrefecture What can I say? Humans are creatures of habits. Therefore, it always makes sense to go with the state of the art (Okay, maybe not always install all innovations immediately ). Of course, the users used to work with command line programs, but they were also trained for this (in the vocational training). Today, anyone can buy a PC and work with it, and certainly not because everyone opens their manual and gets stuck in it. Thatās why I prefer to stay in the present and rarely refer to the past.
Furthermore, a lot can go wrong when using command line programs if you donāt know how to do it. Files are quickly lost or changed in such a way that they are no longer usable. A sane GUI will not allow this.
What Iām finding frustrating is the default way to launch and SEARCH applications.
The Quicklaunch app helps a bit, but when you have a huge amount of apps installed and you donāt remember the name of what you are looking forā¦ Thatās frustrating because you are forced to scroll the entire (leaf) menu and read all the names in hope that a bell sounds in your memory.
What hurges me to propose this itās that we have a database filesystem and we can use it to help us finding the program we are looking for, for example:
we are looking for the browser webpositive, but we donāt remember its name. Why donāt use a stripped down function of āfindā (the one in the leaf menu) for finding the words ābrowserā, āinternetā, āwebā, āwebpositiveā? Itās one of the (few) nice things I appreciate of Gnome3 (or the windows start menu?). But instead of using an external database as in linux, we have it already there, just under the feet.
Of course I know the possibility, still I mentioned the ādefault wayā and still itās a slow way to search apps and needs some more clicking and moving around mouse, which slows the operation, still is a brain (not so much) āintensiveā task, because you have to look for the directory (for example you have to remember that the browser is in ānetworkā folder) and then read the entries and ādecodeā them for matching what you want (because there are apps that do other things than browsing, wasting your cpu cicles in your mind)
Well if you are talking about my aunt yes for sure
what I mean is Super + br (ā¦owser) and maybe down arrow (similar to GNOME)
is faster than making clicks, eyes-searchings, read every entry and mouse precision movements. This at least in my personal experience. And we can use directly the filesystem to perform the app searching. This does not mean getting rid of actual application menu in Deskbar, but adding an alternative function would be helpful (as in Windows).
Or maybe itās a feature that can be implemented in Qucklaunch, but it needs the translators support.
it can search the default localized app name and the localized attribute for easy finding, for example ādisvilupā (which means development in my language) for ide apps. This means as well that a specific catkeys string should be read and the localized string saved as an attribute to the app file in the filesystem.
Application launch menu is probably the only thing I donāt like in Haiku. Itās slow and unintuitive. Iād rather just have an Applications folder alias on the Desktop.
Something like QuickLaunch or integrating QuickLaunch into Haiku at some point seems like a necessity. Everyone has gotten used to such tools by this point.
IIRC, menu sorting could be done automatically using packages categories. If someone is interested in implementing that, it would be worthy to dig old forum posts as the subject has been discussed several times already.
Sorry I donāt have much to say about this other than to say that the vision I see for the future is to get rid of the Application menu from Deskbar and replace with a regular folder plus a dock of saved apps but that is still a ways off.
Well, maybe keep the menu, but have an option for those that need an Application folder, Ć la macos. So the users can choose what better fits the way they use the system and their tastes / abilities.
We already have a selection of docks (LaunchBox is built-in, personally I prefer LnLauncher) and it is possible to open the Applications menu in Tracker, but it suffers the limitations of Tracker for āblue foldersā and queries (no icon view, no saving of the icon layout).
But Iām not sure thatās a great solution. I would keep the menu and enable some kind of typeahead filtering in it (in addition to restoring the ability of opening the Application menu as a proper Tracker window).
Iām not sure a quicklaunch-only solution is great, is it considered discoverable enough these days? A few years backk it was considered confusing, but maybe now people have been forced to learn it from other OS and we can consider itās something they will immediately understand? Not sure weāre there and not sure weāll ever get there.
I like the ability to just see a list of everything installed, and not having to type some search terms to start seeing something.
That being said, I think this issue has been discussed over and over again over the years, and Iām not sure there is a point in discussing it again. Is someone going to write the code or is this just yet another forum topic?
). Of course, the users used to work with command line programs, but they were also trained for this (in the vocational training). Today, anyone can buy a PC and work with it, and certainly not because everyone opens their manual and gets stuck in it. Thatās why I prefer to stay in the present and rarely refer to the past.
